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Health and Welfare

Mosquitoes in Lower Numbers

This time of year can be a peak period for mosquitoes. But, environmental health officials in Lexington are not seeing big problems so far. Aside from the nuisance of itchy bites, mosquitoes can carry serious diseases. When the West Nile virus came on the scene several years ago, Luke Mathias with the Fayette County Health Department says his office received a flood of calls. He says now the calls register about 25 a month.

“West Nile when West Nile was, not that it’s still not a concern, but when it first came on the scene and was pretty major, we were getting that in a week, easy. There’s many days when we got 20-25 calls in a day. Right now we’re only getting that in about a month,” said Mathias.

“I know in July we’ve had, in the middle to the end part of July we had record amount of rains, so that would lead one to believe that quite possibly we could see resurgence in the mosquito population,” added Mathias.